The Magician’s Land (10 page)

As the only accredited college for magic on the North American continent, Brakebills had a very large applicant pool to draw from, and it drank that pool dry. Technically nobody really applied there, Dean Fogg simply skimmed the cream of high school seniors off the top. The cream of the cream—the outliers, the extreme cases of precocious genius and obsessive motivation, the statistical freaks who had the brains and the high pain tolerance that the study of magic required. Fogg took them aside and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse; or at any rate if they could refuse it, they wouldn’t remember it.

Privately Plum thought they could put a tiny bit more emphasis in the selection process on emotional intelligence, along with the other kind. The Brakebills student body was a bit of a psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality and to actually want to work that hard you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.

Plum’s discipline was camouflage magic, the magic of concealment, and she was considered an illusionist, which she was perfectly happy about. Being an illusionist at Brakebills was, if Plum said it herself, a pretty sweet deal. You got to hang out in a tiny invisible folly castle on the edge of the forest that was quite difficult to find unless you had an illusionist-type discipline. The castle was delicate and gossamer and very Neuschwanstein, which was a nice way of saying—though Plum didn’t say it—kind of Disney. To get up in one of the towers you climbed a ladder inside it, like you were negotiating a Jefferies tube, and there was just enough room for a little chair and a desk inside the round room at the top.

She didn’t like to be partisan about it, but it was way better than that poky cottage the Physical Kids got stuck with. When they had parties the whole place could be made to twinkle and float up into the air a
little ways, like a fairy castle, connected to the ground by only a rickety, railing-less staircase which people were always falling off of drunk onto the soft grass below. It reminded her of the floating castle at the end of
The Phantom Tollbooth.
Hell yes, it was Disney. Disney FTW!

Once in a while people would ask Plum what the hell kind of an adolescence she’d had that she arrived at Brakebills so cocked, locked and ready to rock. She told them the truth, which was that she’d grown up on an island near Seattle, in comfortable surroundings, the daughter of a mixed marriage: one magician, one non.

She was an only child, and they’d had high standards for Plum, Daddy especially—he was the magician of the couple. As the one basket they’d managed to weave, she had to hold all their eggs, so they’d home-schooled her, and once her talent for magic revealed itself they’d made damn sure she made good on it. Daddy sat with her and made her practice her languages and her exercises, and she’d made very good indeed. True, she’d never been to prom, or played a competitive sport that you couldn’t play sitting down and in complete silence, but you don’t make a magic omelet without breaking some magic eggs.

That was the truth. And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so
tired
sometimes. And because of everything her family asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.

She could have gone on to say even more, which was that magic ran in her family, sort of, that it was something of a tradition, but she never did. People tended to be a bit funny about it, and actually Plum felt a bit funny about it too, so she kept it to herself. It wasn’t hard, because she’d lived most of her life in America and had not even a trace of an English accent, and it was on her mother’s side so Chatwin wasn’t even her last name.

It was her mother’s name though: she was the daughter of Rupert Chatwin’s only son, and that made Plum, as far as she knew, the last living direct descendant of the famous Chatwins of the Fillory books. No
one else in that generation had managed to reproduce, so she was the heir to whatever Chatwins were heir to (though as she was not slow to point out she wasn’t a Chatwin at all but a Purchas, Plum Polson Purchas, Chatwin wasn’t even her middle name)
.
And as a matter of fact there had been a sum of money, royalties that Plover had graciously set aside for the children who’d made his fortune. (His second fortune; he’d been rich already when he started writing about Fillory.) Rupert had used his share to buy a big house in the countryside outside Penzance, which he barely ever left, until the army called him up to die in World War II.

Plum had seen pictures of it, one of those houses that always gets referred to as a pile, a big Georgian pile. It had a name, but she’d forgotten it. Her mother had grown up there, but she didn’t talk much about her childhood—a drafty, echoing place was how she described it. Not a place to be a kid in. The floor was littered with falls of plaster from the crumbling moldings, and Plum’s mother spent winter afternoons huddled up on the stairs by a huge heating duct, big enough for her to have crawled into if the entrance hadn’t been covered by a knotted-wrought-iron grate, and letting the lukewarm air wash weakly over her.

When she grew up Plum’s mother left her heritage behind. Her Chatwin ancestors struck her as dangerously melancholy and fanciful, and she sold the house and its contents and moved to America to become a publicist for Microsoft. She met Plum’s dad at a charity ball, and it wasn’t till they were well into their courtship that he revealed to her what he really did in all his spare time. Once Mom got over the shock of a lifetime, they went ahead and got married anyway and had Plum, and they were a happy magical nuclear family.

You couldn’t talk about the Fillory stuff at Brakebills. Everybody loved Fillory. It was their most precious childhood fantasy, they used to run around their backyards or basement rec rooms or whatever they ran around in pretending they were Martin Chatwin, boy-hero of a magical world of green fields and talking animals where they would attain total and complete self-actualization. And Plum got that, totally and completely. It was their fantasy, and it was perfect and innocent and true, at least in the way that such things were true. She would never try to take that away from them.

And literally everybody at Brakebills grew up on Fillory. The place was one big five-year Fillory convention.

But Plum, through whose very veins the mighty blood of the Chatwins flowed, did not grow up on Fillory. They didn’t even have the books; Plum had only read the first one,
The World in the Walls,
and that was on the sly, in snatches, at the public library. Plum’s parents didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and they didn’t read Christopher Plover.

Plum didn’t mind. Once you found out that magic was real, fictional wonderlands were pretty small change by comparison. So she quietly opted out of a public life as the last scion of the Chatwin line. She could do without the fuss: being the living incarnation of the most innocent, ardent childhood fantasies of pretty much everybody you met was not actually a gift from the gods.

But there was more to it than that, there always had been. Underneath her mother’s scorn and indifference there was something else, and Plum wasn’t completely sure but she thought it might be fear. Fillory had made the Chatwin family famous, but most people didn’t know—or they knew but chose not to think about it—that it had ruined them too. Martin, Plum’s great-uncle, high king and hero of the Fillory books, had disappeared when he was thirteen. He was never found. Jane, the youngest, the moppet, vanished when she was the same age. The others survived, more or less, but no one came out of it unscathed. Helen changed her name and ended her life as an evangelical Christian in Texas. Fiona Chatwin got along by never once mentioning Fillory as an adult; when pressed on the subject she exhibited faint surprise and claimed she’d never heard of it.

As for Rupert, Plum’s great-grandfather, he was by all accounts a wreck of a man who spent his adult life in neurotic seclusion until Field Marshal Erwin Rommel came along to put him out of his misery.

Something had happened to that family. There was a curse on them, and its name was Fillory—Plum’s mom talked about Fillory like it was almost real. Maybe it was the books, maybe it was Plover, maybe it was the parents, or the war, or fate, but when Fillory and Earth touched the collision was pure damage, and the Chatwins were the point of contact. They were right there at ground zero and they were blown to vapor, like
the human shadows at Hiroshima. Plum was pretty sure that none of them had attained total or even partial self-actualization.

Plum’s mother wanted no part of that. And a good thing too, as far as Plum was concerned, because deep down she felt the fear too. When Plum discovered magic it was the most magnificent kind of surprise, the kind that never got less surprising. The world was even more interesting than she thought it was! But it also made her uneasy. Because just speaking logically here, if magic was real then could you still be absolutely one-hundred-percent positive that Fillory wasn’t? And if Fillory was real—which it almost certainly wasn’t—then whatever it was that had torn through an entire generation of her family like a lion through a flock of loitering gazelle was real too, and it might still be out there. Plum dug into magic with both hands, but always at the back of her mind was the thought that she might go too far, dig too deep, and dig up something that she would wish had stayed buried.

She especially thought about that when those depressive, anhedonic chemicals were singing in her bloodstream, because then she kind of wanted to dig it up. She wanted to look it in the face. She could hear Fillory calling to her, or if not Fillory then something—somewhere beautiful and distant and sirenlike where she had never been but that was also somehow home. And she knew what side of the family her depressive streak came from. That was her Chatwin inheritance, right there.

So she kept her Chatwinity to herself. She didn’t want people pushing at it, picking at it, lest its ragged, unstable edges start to unravel. Sometimes Plum wondered if there was a way to use her Discipline to hide not just things but words, facts, names, feelings, hide them so well that even she couldn’t find them. What she wanted was to hide herself from herself.

But she couldn’t. That was stupid. You were who you were. You lived your life. You didn’t brood—ruminative thinking, that’s what her shrink had called it. You got on with things. You founded the League. You pranked the hell out of Wharton.

Plum wound up having a pretty good day; at any rate it was a lot better than Wharton’s. In first period he found more pencil shavings on the seat of his chair. Walking to lunch he found his pockets stuffed full
of jet-black pencil eraser rubbings. It was like a horror movie—his precious pencils were being tortured to death, minute by minute, in an undisclosed location, and he was powerless to save them! He would rue his short-pouring ways, so he would.

Passing Wharton by chance in a courtyard, Plum let her eyes slide past his with a slow smile she felt only a little bit bad about. Was it her imagination, or did he look just the slightest bit haunted? Maybe Brakebills did have a ghost after all. Maybe it was Plum.

Finally—and this was Plum’s touch, and she privately thought it was the deftest one—in his fourth-period class, a practicum on diagramming magical energies, Wharton found that the Brakebills pencil he was using, on top of its bad hand-feel and whatever else, wouldn’t draw what he wanted it to. Whatever spell he tried to diagram, whatever points and rays and vectors he tried to sketch, they inevitably formed a series of letters.

The letters spelled out:
COMPLIMENTS OF THE LEAGUE.

D
inners at Brakebills had a nice formal pomp about them. When one was cornered by sad, nostalgic Brakebills graduates who had peaked in college and were back reliving their glory days, sooner or later they always got around to reminiscing about evenings in the ol’ dining hall. It was long and narrow and shadowy and paneled in dark wood and lined with murky oil paintings of past deans in various states of period dress. Light came from hideous, lopsided silver candelabras placed along the table every ten feet, and the candle flames were always flaring up or snuffing out or changing color under the influence of some stray spell or other. Everybody wore identical Brakebills uniforms. Students’ names were inscribed on the table at their assigned places, which changed nightly according to, apparently, the whims of the table.

That night Plum ate her first course as usual, two rather uninspired crab cakes, skipping the wine, as she usually did, then excused herself to go to the ladies’. As Plum passed behind her Darcy discreetly held out the silver pencil case behind her back, and Plum pocketed it. She wasn’t going to the ladies’, of course. Well, she was, but only because she had to. She wouldn’t be going back after.

Plum walked briskly through the empty House to the Senior Common Room, which the faculty rarely bothered to lock, so confident were they that no student would dare to cross its threshold unchaperoned. But Plum dared.

The Senior Common Room was a cavernous, silent, L-shaped
chamber lined with bookcases and littered with shiny red-leather couches and chairs. It was empty, or almost. The only person there was Professor Coldwater, and she wasn’t worried about him. She figured he might be there. Most of the faculty were at dinner, but according to the roster it was his turn to eat late, with the First Years.

He was an odd one, Professor Coldwater. Young for a professor. Kept to himself—you rarely saw him outside the classroom. He was new, and opinion about him was divided as to whether he was a genius or a bit insane or both. He had a cult following among the students: his lectures were peppered with exotic magicks and bravura demonstrations, or so the legends went. Plum had never seen one—she was way past Minor Mendings.

The other professors didn’t seem that wild about him. He was constantly getting handed the crap jobs that nobody else wanted, like eating with the First Years. He didn’t seem to mind, or maybe he just didn’t notice. She got the impression he had something else going on, something that was part of a larger frame of reference than the changeless yet ephemeral world of Brakebills. He was always hurrying in and out of the library with thick books under his arms, mumbling to himself like he was doing math problems in his head.

That was one of the reasons she wasn’t too worried about his catching her in the Senior Common Room. Even if he did notice her he probably wouldn’t care enough to write her up; more likely he would just kick her out. Either way: totally worth it.

Right now Professor Coldwater was at the far end of the room with his back to her. He was tall and skinny and stood bolt upright, with his weird white hair, a wineglass forgotten in his hand, staring into the fire. Plum breathed a silent prayer to whatever saint it was who watched over absent-minded professors and made sure their minds stayed absent. She cut swiftly through the right angle of the L into its shorter arm where he couldn’t see her.

Because it was time for the grand reveal. Toward the end of dinner, when Wharton was ready to bring out the dessert wines, he would retreat to the wine closet, which wasn’t so much a closet as a room the size of a studio apartment. To his shock he would find Plum already in possession of same, having entered it on the sly through a secret back
passage from the Senior Common Room. Fait accompli. Then she would present the League’s demands, and he would capitulate to every single one of them.

It was the chanciest bit of the plan, because the existence of this secret back passage was a matter of speculation, but whatever, if it didn’t work she’d find some normal, less dramatic way to corner him.

She looked quickly over her shoulder—Coldwater still out of view and/or otherwise engaged—then knelt by the wainscoting. She took a deep breath. Third panel from the left. Hmm—the one on the end was half a panel, not sure whether she should count it or not. Well, she’d try it both ways. She traced a word in Old English with her finger, spelling it out in a runic alphabet, the Elder Futhark, and meanwhile clearing her mind of everything but the taste of a really oaky chardonnay paired with a hot-buttered toast point.

Lemon squeezy. She felt the locking spell release even before it happened: the panel swung outward on a set of previously invisible hinges.

Annoyingly though, the passage had been sealed. Ten feet in it ended in a brick wall, and the bricks had been bricked in such a way as to form a design that Plum recognized as an absolutely brutal hardening charm—just a charm, yes, but a massively powerful one. Not undergraduate stuff. Some professor had bothered to put this here, and they’d spent some time on it too. Plum pursed her lips and snorted out through her nose.

Crouching down, she stepped into the passage and pulled the little door shut behind her. She snapped on a simple light spell, a friendly glowy will-o’-the-wisp. Then she stared at the brick wall for five minutes, in the dimness of the little passageway, lost to the world in an analytical trance. In her mind the pattern in the bricks floated free and hung before her all on its own, pure and abstract and shining. Mentally she entered the pattern, inhabited it, pushed at it from the inside with cognitive fingers, feeling for any sloppy joins or subtle imbalances.

There must be something. Come on, Plum: it’s easier to break magic than to make it. You know this. Whoever drew this seal was smart. But was she smarter than Plum?

There was something odd about the angles. The essence of a glyph like this wasn’t the angles, it was the underlying topology—you could
deform it a good deal and not lose the power as long as its essential geometric properties remained intact. The angles of the joins were, up to a point, arbitrary.

But the funny thing about the angles of these joins was that they were funny. They were sharper than they needed to be. They were nonarbitrary. There was a pattern to them, a pattern within the pattern: 17 degrees, 3 degrees. Seventeen and three. Two of them here, two of them there, the only angles that appeared twice.

When she saw it she snorted again. It was a code. A moronically simple alphabetical code. Seventeen and three.
Q
and
C
. Quentin Coldwater.

It was a signature of sorts, a watermark. A Coldwatermark. Professor Coldwater had set this seal, and when she saw that, she saw it all. He’d wanted a weak spot, a back door in case he needed to undo it later. His vanity signature was the flaw in the pattern. She extracted the little knife from Wharton’s pencil case and worked it into the crumbly mortar around one particular brick. She ran it all the way around the edge, then she knocked on the brick with her knuckles:
shave and a haircut
. Free and loose, it pushed out cleanly: clunk. Deprived of that one brick, and hence the integrity of its pattern, the rest of the wall gave up the ghost and fell apart.

Why would he have sealed it up? And why him in particular—everybody knew Coldwater was a wine lush. She could always ask him, he was standing about twenty yards away. Or she could get on with what she was here for. It was chilly in the passageway, much chillier than in the cozy Senior Common Room. The walls were unfinished boards over very old stone.

Dead reckoning, it was about one hundred yards from the Senior Common Room to the back of the wine closet, but she’d only gone half that distance before she came to a door, fortunately unlocked and unsealed. More passage, then another door. Like she was going through a series of airlocks. Weird. You could never tell what you were going to find in this place, even after living here for four and a half years.

The fifth door opened onto open air. That was very odd. It was a pretty little square courtyard that she’d never seen before, maybe twenty
yards on a side. Mostly grass, with one tree, a pear tree, espaliered against a high stone wall. She’d always found espaliers a little creepy. It was like somebody had crucified the poor thing.

Also she was almost positive that there shouldn’t have been a moon tonight.

“Nutso,” Plum said quietly. She frowned at it. The moon looked back at her blankly, pretending not to care. She hurried across the courtyard to the next door.

It opened directly onto one of the upper floors of the library. That definitely wasn’t right; she was traversing some magically noncontiguous spaces here. The Brakebills library was arranged around the interior walls of a tower that narrowed toward the top, and this must have been one of the teensy tiny uppermost floors, which Plum had only ever glimpsed from far below, and which to be honest she’d always assumed were just there for show. She never thought there were any actual books up there.

In fact now she realized that these upper floors must be built to false perspective, to make the tower look taller than it was, because it was very tiny indeed, barely a balcony, like one of those tiny houses that mad kings built for their royal dwarfs. She had to navigate it on her hands and knees; she felt like Alice in Wonderland, grown too big. The books looked real enough though, their brown leather spines flaking like pastry, with letters stamped on them in gold. Some interminable many-volume reference work about ghosts.

The other weird thing was that they weren’t quite inanimate: they poked themselves out at her from the shelves, butted her as she crawled past, as if they were inviting her to open them and read, or daring her to, or begging her. A couple of them actually jabbed her in the ribs pretty hard. They must not get a lot of visitors, she thought. Probably this is like when you visit the puppies at the shelter and they all jump up and want to be petted.

No, thank you. If she wished to consult them she would be in touch via the usual channels. It was a relief to crawl through the miniature door at the far end of the balcony—it was practically a cat-door—and back into a normal corridor. This was taking longer than she thought.

But it wasn’t too late. The main course would be half over, but there
was still dessert, and she thought there was cheese tonight too. She could still make it if she hurried.

This corridor was tight, almost a crawl space. In fact it was one—as near as she could tell she was
inside
one of the walls of Brakebills. On the other side was the dining hall: she could hear the warm hum of talk and the clank of heavy silverware, and she could look out through a couple of the paintings—there were peepholes in the eyes, like in old movies about haunted houses. In fact they were just serving the main, a nice rare lamb spiked with spears of rosemary, and the sight of it made her hungry. She felt like she was a million miles away from everyone and everything she knew. She was a ghost herself, the skeleton at the feast, the world in the walls. She already felt nostalgic, like one of those teary alums, for back when she was sitting at the table with her bland crab cakes, half an hour ago, back when she knew exactly where she was.

And there was Wharton, showily pouring his mingy glasses of red, totally unrepentant. The sight emboldened her. That was why she was here. She was going to get through this. For the League.

Though God, how long was it going to take? The next door opened out onto the roof. The night air was bone cold. She hadn’t been up here since the time Professor Sunderland had turned them into geese and they’d flown down to Antarctica to study at Brakebills South. It was lonely and quiet after the dining hall—she was very high up, higher than the leafless tops of all but the tallest trees. The roof was so sharply raked she had to crawl again, and the shingles were gritty under her palms. She could see the Hudson River off in the distance, a long sinuous leaden squiggle. She shivered just looking at it.

And for the record: no moon. It was gone, back to its proper place.

Which way? She was losing the thread. After a long cold think, resulting in no definitive conclusions, Plum just jimmied the lock on the nearest dormer window and let herself in.

She was in a student’s room. Actually if she had to she’d guess it was Wharton’s room, though she’d never seen it.

“OMG,” she said out loud. “The irony.”

What were the odds? These spaces were beyond noncontiguous. Somebody at Brakebills, possibly Brakebills itself, was fucking with her.

The room was messy as hell, which was somehow endearing, since she thought of Wharton as a control freak. And it had a nice smell. She half suspected she had stumbled into a magical duel with Wharton himself, except no way could he pull off something like this. Maybe he had help—maybe he was part of a shadowy Anti-League, committed to frustrating the goals of the League! That would actually be kind of cool.

This would have been a reasonable moment to bail, exit the vehicle and slink back to the dining hall. But no: that would mean giving up, going back, and that wasn’t Plum. She went forward, always forward, never look back. Eye of the tiger. She had a job to do, a mission for the League, of which she was the God damned chief executive officer.

So she wasn’t going to fight against the dream-logic, she was going to steer into the skid and see where it took her. Onward and downward.

To leave by the front door, she knew instinctively, would have been to break the dream-spell, so instead she opened Wharton’s closet door, somehow confident that—yes, look, there was a small door at the back of it. Turning to take a final look around she couldn’t help but notice, by the by, on his desk, a fresh box of those pencils. He’d already got replacements. Why exactly had they thought those were the only ones? He probably had truckloads of them. She opened the door in the closet and stooped through.

—

From here on out her travels ran entirely on dream-rails. The door took her into another courtyard, but now it was daytime. The spaces were losing temporal, uh, contiguousness—contiguity?—as well as the spatial kind. In fact it was earlier today, because there she was, Plum herself, crossing the lightly frosted grass, and passing Wharton, and there was the eye-sliding. It was a strange sight. But Plum’s tolerance for strange had been on the rise, lo this past half hour.